2.2 A 5G Mobile Gaming-Centric SoC with High-Performance Thermal Management in 4nm FinFET

In recent years, mobile gaming has grown rapidly to overtake both console and PC gaming markets globally. Thus far, modern smartphones have been powerful enough to support gaming requirements. However, demands of high-performance and computing power cause thermal management challenges to sustain performance during gaming. As shown in Fig. 2.2.1, frequency upgrades did not bring commensurate benchmark improvements due to the thermal wall. This work presents a high-performance fully integrated 5G flagship mobile gaming-centric SoC in a 4nm FinFET process. The SoC consists of an octa-core tri-gear 3.35/3.2/1.8GHz CPU and a deca-core 955MHz GPU to provide a high-quality gaming experience. To maintain high-performance operation under heat ramp-up, a thermal management system that adopts threshold temperature $(\mathrm{T}_{\text{thr}})$ control along with energy/temperature-aware scheduling (E/TAS) is proposed. On-chip sensors which monitor temperature, voltage and leakage current are designed to acquire a run-time power budget for E/TAS to boost performance based on computing demand. The proposed thermal management system raises $\mathrm{T}_{\text{thr}}$ by up to $10^{\mathrm{o}}\mathrm{C}$ with $2000/^{\circ}\mathrm{C}$ benchmark score gain, on average, and maintains a stable temperature range with occasional damping well controlled within $5^{\mathrm{o}}\mathrm{C}$ while throttling. The gaming phone achieves a score of 1.146M for the AnTuTu v9.4.2 benchmark.